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Hi, this is strategycast, where smart marketers and bold business thinkers share the plays behind brand breakthroughs. I'm Lori Jones, president and CEO of Avocet Communications. If your AI generated messaging sounds generic, isn't converting or feels off brand, this episode will show you exactly how to fix it. You'll learn how to build the inputs that drive back better outputs, including how to write a clear value proposition, define meaningful differentiators, and structure messaging that actually resonates with your audience. We'll also break down a simple workflow you can use immediately to decide what AI should handle and what you need to own as a marketer. Kate DiLeo joins us today. She's a brand strategist and creator of the Brand Trifecta methodology, helping companies turn unclear messaging into measurable growth. She spent years refining how marketers can align psychology, structure, and storytelling to drive real results.
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Welcome to the show, Kate. Thanks so much for having me, Lori.
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I tell you, this is. I love this topic. We talk so many high level strategies on StrategyCast, and this is really honing in on one of the very specific areas that is so incredibly important that strategy really leads messaging. Absolutely, yeah. Before we get there, tell us a little bit about your journey and not just the companies that you've worked with or for, but really what led you to love this very finite part of marketing.
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You know, my journey has been very interesting. So if I rewind back to the beginning, I actually was pursuing a PhD in linguistic anthropology. I was just about to start all of my coursework and the market crashed. And I had a great professor who looked at me and said, hey, listen, you should probably just leave academia, go get a day job, pay off your undergrad debt. And so, Lori, my start with branding actually really started because I had to go get a sales job. Wow. In a very tough economy.
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And I took a job cold calling IT professionals to sell them$2,500 training classes. Not easy. No.
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I think that that's probably one of the worst jobs you could take if you're a green salesperson. Right. Because it's my first job. Actually, it might have been my second job when I was in high school was actually working for a photography company calling up families to get their photos taken. I mean, there's nothing harder, right, than doing this, this, this cold calling thing. And you have to remember, for a lot of us listening today, this was like the glory days of sales, where we did not even have HubSpot, we did not even have Salesforce. There was no automation. I mean, I was smiling and dialing 40 to 60 dials a day, I think. I think the only automation I had, I remember was when I figured out the template tool in Microsoft Outlook 2008, where I could copy and paste an email template and then, you know, modify it for Bob versus Susan. Oh, my, how much time it saved me.
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So, you know, I actually, though, cut my teeth in branding, really, in that job. Because what happened was, is they'd given me all the training in the world, all the sales scripts, but nothing was breaking through for me to be able to really compel that person on the other end of the call to want to stay on and have a conversation or take the next step and buy. And so, candidly, as a young sales professional, I kind of realized if I don't try this a different way, I'm going to be out of a job. So I just tested a theory in my own brain that turned out was brand. And I simply called these people up and I just said, hi, my name's Kate, I'm with such and such company. This is what we do.
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This is how we solve your problem. And 1, 2, 3, this is how we're different. And then I'd shut up and Lori, it worked. Wow. It worked. I was breaking through noise, breaking down doors. I ended up getting all the world.
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Yeah. And sure enough, I was so successful managing my own quota that I got recruited to go write brand pitches for the rest of the team, moved into the world of agency marketing, and then I eventually went out on my own about seven years ago, took the business full time and have now worked with over, gosh, over 350 brands. Yeah. With my business to help them improve their message. That's amazing. You know, I.
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I think strategy, of course, is incredibly important, but I think most strategy fails when the messaging does not ladder up to the right strategy number one. Or it's just they skip strategy, they go right to messaging. And it's a real issue with a lot of marketers. I see it day in and day out, just, you know, in television advertising and display advertising in my own life. And it's something that we really try to turn around for brands as well. You've got a very, very unique process. It's called the brand trifecta.
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So you're smiling and dialing. You've worked with all these brands.
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What led you to the epiphany that most were doing it wrong and there was a right way to get it done? Yeah, you know, first off, I think I was just in an observation mode really early on in My career, where I was going, something's not right clicking, something's not resonating. Why isn't this breaking through? And even when I worked in the marketing agency world for, for quite a while, I was noticing that if we weren't hitting specific pieces of content or information in that first 15 to 30 seconds, two things were happening. One, the prospect was going, well, that's nice, but not imperative for me. And two, on the other hand, we were actually creating more confusion where they were going down rabbit trails asking for more details on things that we actually didn't want them to look into yet.
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So we were pull out of the core sales conversation that we wanted to have happen. So what actually I kind of stepped back and realized is that when the brand was converting, when we got somebody to a conversion moment, a self selection moment, in that first 30 seconds, it was happening when we systematically were hitting on three things. And those three things are now what I call the brand trifecta.
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And by the way, I ended up talking to communications experts with PhDs, neuroscientists, psychologists to talk about is this, is this on track? And all of them were like, yes, this is basic brain psychology of what the brain needs to know to have an opt in moment. So here's the three things and you. Isn't it? Yeah, I was like, hang on, am I just going down some random path here? Like, what's happening? Is there science behind this? Okay, so here's the three things that I think as marketers we probably are taking for granted. But actually if you were to pull back and look at your message of when it's winning, you're hitting on three things in this order. By the way, the first thing you're doing really well is you've got a short, sharp tagline that's five or six words that really answers the question of what do you do?
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Yeah, and that's the first part of the brand trifecta. That tagline, five to six words hits on the promise of what you do for the customer. The second thing that follows it up, and most brands do this really well, is they deliver a value proposition statement.
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It's two sentences, interestingly enough, not one that says, here's the reality you buyer are facing now, here's how to solve that problem. Yeah, we can unpack in a minute too. How do you actually write that? How is it phrase? Because that's fascinating. But value proposition statement, we all know this as marketers, so tagline, follow, value, value prop. Most of us are doing a good job of probably Having these pieces, in fact, if you were go to the homepage of your website, you're like, oh yeah, we got that. Yep. Here's what was missing 90% of the time though, is they didn't have the third layer and it was creating confusion and creating a drop off for buyers to know the next step. The third piece of this brand trifecta is the top three to five differentiator points, the big bullets of how your brand is different and better than the rest. And what I kept running into is that if I did not allow the buyer to ask the question, so are you like this brand or like this brand? Are you like that or that? For example, in my world they may ask me, Kate, are you like a graphic designer or are you a fractional cmo, Right. We get this comparison question. If I didn't allow that to happen and then immediately address the three to five ways, oh, that's a great question. But here's how I'm different. Lori. Well then the problem that was happening is that the buyer had no contextual evidence of how this promise that I already given them was truly unique and therefore relevant of why they should go deeper into the what that I offered. I love it.
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It makes sense to you and I because we do this day in and day out. But I think from a diagnostic standpoint, if our listeners right now are just even taking a look at their homepage and they're dissecting the order of operation is what you refer to it as. I think there's going to be some light bulbs going off because quite often we don't answer what we do quick enough, we don't tell them why they should care quick enough. And then our points of differentiation, quite frankly, are most often points of parity. There's nothing that's exactly right. There is nothing that truly does differentiate you to create distinction with the competitive set. How often do you run into that parody issue that so many brands face and don't know it? Well, the two pieces that you're mentioning, number one, we don't address it fast enough. Oh my gosh. You know, it's so funny how we're so close to what we do. So sometimes part of this process when refining your message, is to pull back up, step back out of it for a second, get away from the offer, the thing you're giving and go, hang on. If I could answer these three questions, what do you do? How do you solve my problem? How are you different? How would I write those in simple, plain terms in only a few sentences? When you can nail that, oh my goodness, then somebody's ready to hear about the thing. But very often we dig right into and then it does this and this and this and this and our offer does. Well, that's all product messaging. That's not, that's not top level brand messaging.
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What we find most common though is that especially in today's very, very competitive marketplace, really nailing points of differentiation is probably the hardest part.
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So, yes, it is hard to have, you know, five or six words of what you do and a strong value prop. Now, granted, I bet you a lot of us listening in today we could get there. You know what's really tough though, is to really do the analysis to understand if I were to pressure test what I think makes us different against what the competition is saying, what are my actual points of differentiation, what could I really hang my hat on? And we can no longer just kind of come up with it willy nilly, like we could probably even do five years ago. In fact, the amount of analysis that I have to do for brands now compared to even three years ago is completely different.
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Well, it is. And sometimes it's even fabricated to create differentiation, if absolutely not necessarily in a lying or, you know, non trusting way, but in a way when all things are completely equal, what can we do to create more, you know, power in this product? And it could be a special ingredient.
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You know, take a look at, I think it was Colgate and I'm going to totally screw this up. But you know, you take a look at the gum category. You know, gum is gum is gum. Same thing with the tire category.
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Tires are tight on the round, they're black, you know, they've got different tread lengths.
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I mean, there's not a lot of differentiation. And I believe it was Colgate years and years and years ago added a special ingredient to their gum that was simply a, you know, little piece of, you know, a drop of oil. That's all it was. But they turned that drop of oil into such a uniqueness.
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Yes. That they were able to go from parody to distinction and own it. Even though it really didn't taste different, taste better, and really was no different than the next gum off the shelf. Yeah. It's so fascinating. Yeah. In, in, in. If you're thinking like, well, what are the categories of differentiation I could even hang my hat on, because that's another question I get asked a lot is, well, what defines differentiation? O so now I'm not saying you want to play a price war, but brands in the past have done A really good job. Consumer brands play the price war. You better believe it. They do a great job. Or you do the premium white glove on the other side of it, right? This happens in B2B. Oh, we're premium or white glove. Often things categories that you see are level of service or support, proprietary methodology or approach. By the way, that one gets missed a lot.
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Oh, there's so many brands where I'm like you guys, you actually have a methodology of why you that the product is built on. You got to talk about that.
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So that's a big missing aha. For a lot of brands. They're like, oh, that's the thing, there's science behind it. Ding, ding, ding. Right about the science.
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Other things could be speed to value. Are you faster at your ability to deliver value? Excellent. That's a great differentiator. Do you know what's not a differentiator anymore? What? Your people. Yeah, exactly. We all have great people right now.
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Now here's what I will say though this is interesting because I used to have everyone said our people are so nice. I'm sure they are, Bob. But you know, everybody's people are nice. Probably why you hired them, Right? And they're good at what they do. Here's where it's starting to shift in the current climate.
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We do see however that for certain service companies a big differentiator is if they have near shore employees and it's not. And that support's not being answered by a bot. So if you can Prove, hey, we have 24, 7 support from a local team that knows and understands the industry and can answer your technical questions, then yes, that could be a differentiator compared to perhaps competitors who are really outsourcing or leveraging AI only for their support. Great example. Well, and I think often as well, I mean those are great examples and very, very important.
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But often people try to be all those things.
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So they try to be all things to all people. Correct. You know, you can't be innovative, price, have quality customer experience, speed to value, you know, whatever it might be. You can't, you can't do all those things because it's going to be incredibly confusing. And also quite often this is why points of parity, graphs and competitive analysis are so important when it comes to this. Because sometimes people own that very, very well. They do if a competitor owns it very, very well. And you truly are trying to create that distinction. And then you've got to go after something you can own and would be difficult for them to implement.
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Correct. I agree. And you're hitting on another layer of brand, which I think is important as well, is not only owning a key point of differentiation, that's going to feel sticky. So if somebody compared you apples to apples and had two screens pulled up and they compared your website to the next. Right. I always want you to think about if they pulled up your message next door, what's going to stand out to them, where you're like, oh, that feels different. Oh, I love that. Okay. That's what we're looking at here from a differentiation standpoint. But I do think this brings up, in order to even get to the moment where you're at, the ability to, to put differentiation on the map and put kind of the, the big sticky point on the board, there's two things that have to happen. Number one, you have to really know yourself and take an honest competitive analysis where you're pulling back and going current state, how are we actually different?
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And what's table stakes now? Yeah, because table stakes has changed in the last 12 months. My gosh, it does.
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And. And you want to be able to own it for a long time. So you've got to anticipate the future as well. You do. You know, it's a prime example of this. And I'll come back to point two is. And I can show you guys an example later on here, but about two years ago, everybody started globbing AI to onto everything. Did you notice this? Like this plus AI. And we have AI. And we have AI. I'm sorry, but in the last four months, have you not heard that that's just an expectation now for most people, if you're a product company, operating system. Hello. So now you can't just say plus AI anymore.
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The speed at which our buyers have shifted their mentality around something as quintessential and important as AI is unbelievable. Where before we had years to come up with differentiation and now we're having to pivot and go, gosh, we can't say that or we're going to actually look outdated. Oh, no, Exactly. Okay, Real point number two. And then I want to go back up to Tagline really quick and ask you a couple questions. Absolutely. So the second piece, so that you've got to be thinking about here is it's not only like, know thyself, as I say, right. Do the competitive analysis is know who the heck you're talking to. Now, this is obviously for all of us. We understand it. Who's your icp, who's your target audiences?
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But it's very fascinating that Still, a lot of us, if we were to really boil this down, one of two things happens. One, either have a broad strokes category.
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We're like, well, we serve midsize manufacturing companies. Okay, great. But who are the humans behind that category? Do you have psychographics built? Do you have role based Personas of knowing who the buyers actually are and like, how they make decisions and what's their level of bureaucracy or the way that they think and operate? And on the flip side too, is you. Again, you can't serve everybody. So if you have more than a few categories, that's a big red flag. If you're trying to serve everybody in the world, I would ask you, and I ask every person, is why? Who's actually buying?
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Who are your real top few that you're positioning and marketing to, and who are the. Oh, by the way, so you love, you know, they like you, but they kind of find you versus you going after them. Right.
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A very, very important point there regarding tagline.
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There are so many taglines out there that become filler. They don't have meaning because any company out there could apply that tagline to their business. So your success is our satisfaction is one of those examples. Customer service, you can count on another great example. And then I think the alternative to that is you can take things too far. Long John Silver's years ago, came up with a tagline, we speak fish. This was confusing customers because instead of highlighting their fresh seafood or their expertise, they just said, we speak fish.
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This is another one. Could instinct make you extinct? So this was for a business software consultancy, far too abstract, making visitors guess what they actually offer. Provide some insight on what is right and wrong here. Sure. So, okay, a couple rules of thumb when you're trying to look at a tagline for your company. The first of all, I would tell you, and I'm not an attorney, but by the way, it's gotta be trademarkable. If there's anything that you're gonna trademark, my goodness. Make sure that you have a couple options you can go bring to your, your legal team and go, hey, can we do some knockout searches to see if we can actually hang our hats on and own this? So that's one thing. All right. Second thing, though, when we think about structure and how it's supposed to sound and how ethereal it is, a very, very important rule of thumb is the difference between B2B and taglines. Okay, you have to think about it this way. In B2B, your tagline is that five to six words that really answers the first question a business is going to have about you, which is, well, what do you do? Because imagine walking into a room, you shake hands with a business owner. What are they going to ask you?
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What do you do? Yeah, that's what your. That's your business buyer wants to know right away. So we're talking like, top of the hero section on the homepage. Boom. Get to the point. Unless the company name has what they do in it.
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You snuck ahead of me. I love that. Yes, yes. Because there's the balance act. Right. How it works with the name. It has to work with the name and not be too repetitive. Right. Here's the flip side, though. B2C brands, I feel like in the best way, get away with murder with taglines. They can be so out there.
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How come Nike can just be. Just do it, or oh, my gosh, brands are like, you're worth it. Because the question that a consumer asks when they're looking at purchasing a product is not, tell me what you do, Nike. It is, tell me the promise of who I will become or what I will experience when I have your product in my hand.
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Therein lies the difference. And so those five to six words in the tagline, you have a bit more wiggle room to really be creative and get above it with a promise. Concepts that maybe isn't as concrete. So if you're in B2B listening to this, here's my encouragement. I'm not saying come up with a boring tagline, but the idea would be that when you're writing it, start with the concrete. What is the concrete promise of what do you do for them that speaks to value from there, can you improve and iterate and judge it a little bit with some wordsmithing to make it a bit more punchy? Yeah. And then it becomes more memorable. Which is the key for a people that talk about just do it versus even the brand is just the strength of how that has all worked together over the decades that it's been in force. So want to talk about something quickly here? The tendency is for people to now use AI as a means by which we can just have some smart input and have it develop a tagline and have it develop, you know, the key points of differentiation, so on and so forth.
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There's some caution there. The caution is you're only as good as the input, number one. But also the caution is it's not trademarkable right now. Yes.
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Correct. It's going to take years and years and years for this to get up to the Supreme Court. For it to be trademarkable.
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So talk to us a little bit about the importance of input and. And the dividing line between what you can use AI for and what human absolutely needs to take hold of in place of it. Yeah. Such an important question because even as AI, really, when I started leveraging ChatGPT and now I'm primarily a cloud user, but I actually will pop between both of them. Interestingly enough, as a writer, I love to see the comparison and contrast. It's great. Okay, so whatever your tool of choice, here's what I would say that's really important is the inputs that you need to have are two big pieces that you've got to really think through and kind of create. The first thing is ICP analysis. Now, you can actually go into Claude and help ask it to help you do this, but there's some specific questions you can ask it to get very crystal clear. Don't just give me Claude, the demographics and psychographics around my top audiences that you should think I should be going after or that we think we should be going after, but give me, in writing, in a specific sentence or a quote, what the bottom line, heart pain is that this audience is facing what is their burning platform?
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And so you have to push it a little bit to get a very solid written. Oh, gosh, Kate. The thing that I need is this. And here's. I would need this thing to solve it. Get specific. In your ICP analysis, the second thing that you need to have in order to get the best outputs from AI is what we call a tone of voice system. Now, I can't go super deep on this right now, but what I will say is you can develop this in conjunction with Claud or you can develop it on your own. Many practitioners know how to do that. Many marketers do that on their own accord. Great. I want you to push it, though, beyond just the name of the tone of voice. I want you to think about when you close your eyes, how does the brand actually sound? So you can actually build sections around grammar, usage, punctuation, usage, cadence and rhythm. If you were to go ask ChatGPT or Claude, give me the cadence and rhythm, 10 bullet points of how it sounds. If I were to close my eyes, you'd be so excited about what it comes up with that sounds on brand for you. So these two inputs, Lori, are imperative so that when you move through the process of leveraging AI as you're iterating, we can talk about that to develop brand outputs. They're far better and cleaner and on Brand for you. I love it. Incredible advice there as well. As we're closing in at the end, I want to make sure that we talk about an incredible case study before and after messaging it. And at the end of the day, Kate, what is most important here is the trust that the messaging creates in the eye of the beholder is all about trust. Do they trust us more? Do they trust our brand compared to the competition? And if they do, they will raise their hand and say, call me, I want an appointment. Or they will go in and buy. That's the most important thing. That is really the deliberate output of why this process is so important. You have a company that you've worked with and really a light bulb moment that went off for you on some real world transformation called CallRail.
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Talk to us about that. Right? And so, all right, CallRail came to me and in fact, I can share screen for those of you listening in. I hope you can come back to the video recording at a later date. But CallRail is an amazing brand. Just for a bit of context, they have a full PLG motion. So this, this company is doing about 100 million a year, all full PLG. Wow, wow, wow.
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Really cool, right? And they came to me about a year and a half ago and they said, listen, we're really struggling because we're kind of tacking on AI onto the current platform, but we don't know how to position this. And really messages in such a way to drive conversions and revenue. People aren't going and clicking and doing what we want them to do. So I want to, I want to just share a bit of before and after for you for context.
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So I took them through the same exercises that I do currently with clients.
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But essentially, if you were to look at the. Before, their tagline was call tracking plus AI that turns calls into higher close rates. My goodness, that's a mouthful. And, well, there was a lot happening here and they were missing, you know, a core value prop and it just. But it just seemed disjointed overall, right? There's like, what are we really? What are you selling? And you know, to make it matters even worse, they really weren't talking to differentiators. They were actually just going right into product features, features and benefits. They were missing this key component right below the fold of the page about like, well, here's how we're different and better than the competition. So what we did is we really leveraged plays on words here. Get creative, you guys. But CallRail, so their new tagline is make every conversation Count.
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CallRail actually is a tracking system. So there was a double entendre with the word count. Make every conversation count. And then the value prop. When your businesses on the line, you can't afford a disconnect between marketing and revenue. CallRail connects that us. Look at, look at the way that we were kind of layering these, these meanings and these analogies. And all of a sudden it was, it was really fascinating that people understood from the name, call track, connect conversation with only two sentences. Wow.
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I love that we built differentiators as well. But can I just get to the bottom line? So pretty crazy. Within one month of actually deploying this new messaging, here's what's interesting. They had more than a 20% increase in conversions on their website and they changed to nothing.
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That's trust. Yeah, it's trust right there, Lori. For them, a conversion is. I actually signed up with a free account. They also saw a 20% increase in paid buyers after that. I love it. This is the power of it. And you know, do you think that AI is actually making marketers worse at messaging? No, I just think it's confusing you and it's okay. It's okay to be in the messy middle right now. To tie a bow on what we're talking about earlier with a workflow or process. With AI, I really want to encourage you that you're a great marketer because you're creative and you're smart and you have brain power, you have experience and you have tenure in your industry. Don't let go of that and give the full ownness to AI to develop your message. I want you to remember the inputs, but then leverage AI as your premium draft creator. It's going to give you fantastic drafts. But guess what? Pull your pencil out, sit down and scratch stuff off and go pull your thesaurus. And that's where the magic happens, where a Message goes from 75% wow to 100% Trust building, brand loyalty, conversion, generating message. Well, and you accomplished that with CallRail as well. What is the best way, Kate, for our audience to get in contact with you? Well, if you have any questions on some of this, if you're kind of nerding out over the brand stuff, feel free to certainly check out my website, which is Kate Deleo.com but also connect with me and send me a message on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you and get to know you. Thank you. At Avocet, we believe AI does not replace strategy. It exposes whether you have one. The brands that will stand out are the ones building strong messaging architectures before they scale content production. Because trust is not created by volume. It is created by clarity, consistency, and human understanding. Kate DiLeo, thank you so much for your appearance on StrategyCast. Thanks, Lori, for having me. It's been a pleasure.
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I'm gonna repeat that really quick, okay? Yeah. Kate DiLeo, thank you so much for your appearance on StrategyCast.
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Thanks for having me. Laurie, it's been a pleasure.
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Hi, this is strategycast, where smart marketers and bold business thinkers share the plays behind brand breakthroughs. I'm Lori Jones, president and CEO of Avocet Communications. If your AI generated messaging sounds generic, isn't converting or feels off brand, this episode will show you exactly how to fix it. You'll learn how to build the inputs that drive back better outputs, including how to write a clear value proposition, define meaningful differentiators, and structure messaging that actually resonates with your audience. We'll also break down a simple workflow you can use immediately to decide what AI should handle and what you need to own as a marketer. Kate DiLeo joins us today. She's a brand strategist and creator of the Brand Trifecta methodology, helping companies turn unclear messaging into measurable growth. She spent years refining how marketers can align psychology, structure, and storytelling to drive real results.
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Welcome to the show, Kate. Thanks so much for having me, Lori.
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I tell you, this is. I love this topic. We talk so many high level strategies on StrategyCast, and this is really honing in on one of the very specific areas that is so incredibly important that strategy really leads messaging. Absolutely, yeah. Before we get there, tell us a little bit about your journey and not just the companies that you've worked with or for, but really what led you to love this very finite part of marketing.
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You know, my journey has been very interesting. So if I rewind back to the beginning, I actually was pursuing a PhD in linguistic anthropology. I was just about to start all of my coursework and the market crashed. And I had a great professor who looked at me and said, hey, listen, you should probably just leave academia, go get a day job, pay off your undergrad debt. And so, Lori, my start with branding actually really started because I had to go get a sales job. Wow. In a very tough economy.
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And I took a job cold calling IT professionals to sell them$2,500 training classes. Not easy. No.
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I think that that's probably one of the worst jobs you could take if you're a green salesperson. Right. Because it's my first job. Actually, it might have been my second job when I was in high school was actually working for a photography company calling up families to get their photos taken. I mean, there's nothing harder, right, than doing this, this, this cold calling thing. And you have to remember, for a lot of us listening today, this was like the glory days of sales, where we did not even have HubSpot, we did not even have Salesforce. There was no automation. I mean, I was smiling and dialing 40 to 60 dials a day, I think. I think the only automation I had, I remember was when I figured out the template tool in Microsoft Outlook 2008, where I could copy and paste an email template and then, you know, modify it for Bob versus Susan. Oh, my, how much time it saved me.
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So, you know, I actually, though, cut my teeth in branding, really, in that job. Because what happened was, is they'd given me all the training in the world, all the sales scripts, but nothing was breaking through for me to be able to really compel that person on the other end of the call to want to stay on and have a conversation or take the next step and buy. And so, candidly, as a young sales professional, I kind of realized if I don't try this a different way, I'm going to be out of a job. So I just tested a theory in my own brain that turned out was brand. And I simply called these people up and I just said, hi, my name's Kate, I'm with such and such company. This is what we do.
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This is how we solve your problem. And 1, 2, 3, this is how we're different. And then I'd shut up and Lori, it worked. Wow. It worked. I was breaking through noise, breaking down doors. I ended up getting all the world.
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Yeah. And sure enough, I was so successful managing my own quota that I got recruited to go write brand pitches for the rest of the team, moved into the world of agency marketing, and then I eventually went out on my own about seven years ago, took the business full time and have now worked with over, gosh, over 350 brands. Yeah. With my business to help them improve their message. That's amazing. You know, I.
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I think strategy, of course, is incredibly important, but I think most strategy fails when the messaging does not ladder up to the right strategy number one. Or it's just they skip strategy, they go right to messaging. And it's a real issue with a lot of marketers. I see it day in and day out, just, you know, in television advertising and display advertising in my own life. And it's something that we really try to turn around for brands as well. You've got a very, very unique process. It's called the brand trifecta.
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So you're smiling and dialing. You've worked with all these brands.
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What led you to the epiphany that most were doing it wrong and there was a right way to get it done? Yeah, you know, first off, I think I was just in an observation mode really early on in My career, where I was going, something's not right clicking, something's not resonating. Why isn't this breaking through? And even when I worked in the marketing agency world for, for quite a while, I was noticing that if we weren't hitting specific pieces of content or information in that first 15 to 30 seconds, two things were happening. One, the prospect was going, well, that's nice, but not imperative for me. And two, on the other hand, we were actually creating more confusion where they were going down rabbit trails asking for more details on things that we actually didn't want them to look into yet.
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So we were pull out of the core sales conversation that we wanted to have happen. So what actually I kind of stepped back and realized is that when the brand was converting, when we got somebody to a conversion moment, a self selection moment, in that first 30 seconds, it was happening when we systematically were hitting on three things. And those three things are now what I call the brand trifecta.
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And by the way, I ended up talking to communications experts with PhDs, neuroscientists, psychologists to talk about is this, is this on track? And all of them were like, yes, this is basic brain psychology of what the brain needs to know to have an opt in moment. So here's the three things and you. Isn't it? Yeah, I was like, hang on, am I just going down some random path here? Like, what's happening? Is there science behind this? Okay, so here's the three things that I think as marketers we probably are taking for granted. But actually if you were to pull back and look at your message of when it's winning, you're hitting on three things in this order. By the way, the first thing you're doing really well is you've got a short, sharp tagline that's five or six words that really answers the question of what do you do?
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Yeah, and that's the first part of the brand trifecta. That tagline, five to six words hits on the promise of what you do for the customer. The second thing that follows it up, and most brands do this really well, is they deliver a value proposition statement.
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It's two sentences, interestingly enough, not one that says, here's the reality you buyer are facing now, here's how to solve that problem. Yeah, we can unpack in a minute too. How do you actually write that? How is it phrase? Because that's fascinating. But value proposition statement, we all know this as marketers, so tagline, follow, value, value prop. Most of us are doing a good job of probably Having these pieces, in fact, if you were go to the homepage of your website, you're like, oh yeah, we got that. Yep. Here's what was missing 90% of the time though, is they didn't have the third layer and it was creating confusion and creating a drop off for buyers to know the next step. The third piece of this brand trifecta is the top three to five differentiator points, the big bullets of how your brand is different and better than the rest. And what I kept running into is that if I did not allow the buyer to ask the question, so are you like this brand or like this brand? Are you like that or that? For example, in my world they may ask me, Kate, are you like a graphic designer or are you a fractional cmo, Right. We get this comparison question. If I didn't allow that to happen and then immediately address the three to five ways, oh, that's a great question. But here's how I'm different. Lori. Well then the problem that was happening is that the buyer had no contextual evidence of how this promise that I already given them was truly unique and therefore relevant of why they should go deeper into the what that I offered. I love it.
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It makes sense to you and I because we do this day in and day out. But I think from a diagnostic standpoint, if our listeners right now are just even taking a look at their homepage and they're dissecting the order of operation is what you refer to it as. I think there's going to be some light bulbs going off because quite often we don't answer what we do quick enough, we don't tell them why they should care quick enough. And then our points of differentiation, quite frankly, are most often points of parity. There's nothing that's exactly right. There is nothing that truly does differentiate you to create distinction with the competitive set. How often do you run into that parody issue that so many brands face and don't know it? Well, the two pieces that you're mentioning, number one, we don't address it fast enough. Oh my gosh. You know, it's so funny how we're so close to what we do. So sometimes part of this process when refining your message, is to pull back up, step back out of it for a second, get away from the offer, the thing you're giving and go, hang on. If I could answer these three questions, what do you do? How do you solve my problem? How are you different? How would I write those in simple, plain terms in only a few sentences? When you can nail that, oh my goodness, then somebody's ready to hear about the thing. But very often we dig right into and then it does this and this and this and this and our offer does. Well, that's all product messaging. That's not, that's not top level brand messaging.
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What we find most common though is that especially in today's very, very competitive marketplace, really nailing points of differentiation is probably the hardest part.
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So, yes, it is hard to have, you know, five or six words of what you do and a strong value prop. Now, granted, I bet you a lot of us listening in today we could get there. You know what's really tough though, is to really do the analysis to understand if I were to pressure test what I think makes us different against what the competition is saying, what are my actual points of differentiation, what could I really hang my hat on? And we can no longer just kind of come up with it willy nilly, like we could probably even do five years ago. In fact, the amount of analysis that I have to do for brands now compared to even three years ago is completely different.
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Well, it is. And sometimes it's even fabricated to create differentiation, if absolutely not necessarily in a lying or, you know, non trusting way, but in a way when all things are completely equal, what can we do to create more, you know, power in this product? And it could be a special ingredient.
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You know, take a look at, I think it was Colgate and I'm going to totally screw this up. But you know, you take a look at the gum category. You know, gum is gum is gum. Same thing with the tire category.
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Tires are tight on the round, they're black, you know, they've got different tread lengths.
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I mean, there's not a lot of differentiation. And I believe it was Colgate years and years and years ago added a special ingredient to their gum that was simply a, you know, little piece of, you know, a drop of oil. That's all it was. But they turned that drop of oil into such a uniqueness.
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Yes. That they were able to go from parody to distinction and own it. Even though it really didn't taste different, taste better, and really was no different than the next gum off the shelf. Yeah. It's so fascinating. Yeah. In, in, in. If you're thinking like, well, what are the categories of differentiation I could even hang my hat on, because that's another question I get asked a lot is, well, what defines differentiation? O so now I'm not saying you want to play a price war, but brands in the past have done A really good job. Consumer brands play the price war. You better believe it. They do a great job. Or you do the premium white glove on the other side of it, right? This happens in B2B. Oh, we're premium or white glove. Often things categories that you see are level of service or support, proprietary methodology or approach. By the way, that one gets missed a lot.
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Oh, there's so many brands where I'm like you guys, you actually have a methodology of why you that the product is built on. You got to talk about that.
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So that's a big missing aha. For a lot of brands. They're like, oh, that's the thing, there's science behind it. Ding, ding, ding. Right about the science.
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Other things could be speed to value. Are you faster at your ability to deliver value? Excellent. That's a great differentiator. Do you know what's not a differentiator anymore? What? Your people. Yeah, exactly. We all have great people right now.
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Now here's what I will say though this is interesting because I used to have everyone said our people are so nice. I'm sure they are, Bob. But you know, everybody's people are nice. Probably why you hired them, Right? And they're good at what they do. Here's where it's starting to shift in the current climate.
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We do see however that for certain service companies a big differentiator is if they have near shore employees and it's not. And that support's not being answered by a bot. So if you can Prove, hey, we have 24, 7 support from a local team that knows and understands the industry and can answer your technical questions, then yes, that could be a differentiator compared to perhaps competitors who are really outsourcing or leveraging AI only for their support. Great example. Well, and I think often as well, I mean those are great examples and very, very important.
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But often people try to be all those things.
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So they try to be all things to all people. Correct. You know, you can't be innovative, price, have quality customer experience, speed to value, you know, whatever it might be. You can't, you can't do all those things because it's going to be incredibly confusing. And also quite often this is why points of parity, graphs and competitive analysis are so important when it comes to this. Because sometimes people own that very, very well. They do if a competitor owns it very, very well. And you truly are trying to create that distinction. And then you've got to go after something you can own and would be difficult for them to implement.
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Correct. I agree. And you're hitting on another layer of brand, which I think is important as well, is not only owning a key point of differentiation, that's going to feel sticky. So if somebody compared you apples to apples and had two screens pulled up and they compared your website to the next. Right. I always want you to think about if they pulled up your message next door, what's going to stand out to them, where you're like, oh, that feels different. Oh, I love that. Okay. That's what we're looking at here from a differentiation standpoint. But I do think this brings up, in order to even get to the moment where you're at, the ability to, to put differentiation on the map and put kind of the, the big sticky point on the board, there's two things that have to happen. Number one, you have to really know yourself and take an honest competitive analysis where you're pulling back and going current state, how are we actually different?
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And what's table stakes now? Yeah, because table stakes has changed in the last 12 months. My gosh, it does.
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And. And you want to be able to own it for a long time. So you've got to anticipate the future as well. You do. You know, it's a prime example of this. And I'll come back to point two is. And I can show you guys an example later on here, but about two years ago, everybody started globbing AI to onto everything. Did you notice this? Like this plus AI. And we have AI. And we have AI. I'm sorry, but in the last four months, have you not heard that that's just an expectation now for most people, if you're a product company, operating system. Hello. So now you can't just say plus AI anymore.
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The speed at which our buyers have shifted their mentality around something as quintessential and important as AI is unbelievable. Where before we had years to come up with differentiation and now we're having to pivot and go, gosh, we can't say that or we're going to actually look outdated. Oh, no, Exactly. Okay, Real point number two. And then I want to go back up to Tagline really quick and ask you a couple questions. Absolutely. So the second piece, so that you've got to be thinking about here is it's not only like, know thyself, as I say, right. Do the competitive analysis is know who the heck you're talking to. Now, this is obviously for all of us. We understand it. Who's your icp, who's your target audiences?
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But it's very fascinating that Still, a lot of us, if we were to really boil this down, one of two things happens. One, either have a broad strokes category.
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We're like, well, we serve midsize manufacturing companies. Okay, great. But who are the humans behind that category? Do you have psychographics built? Do you have role based Personas of knowing who the buyers actually are and like, how they make decisions and what's their level of bureaucracy or the way that they think and operate? And on the flip side too, is you. Again, you can't serve everybody. So if you have more than a few categories, that's a big red flag. If you're trying to serve everybody in the world, I would ask you, and I ask every person, is why? Who's actually buying?
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Who are your real top few that you're positioning and marketing to, and who are the. Oh, by the way, so you love, you know, they like you, but they kind of find you versus you going after them. Right.
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A very, very important point there regarding tagline.
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There are so many taglines out there that become filler. They don't have meaning because any company out there could apply that tagline to their business. So your success is our satisfaction is one of those examples. Customer service, you can count on another great example. And then I think the alternative to that is you can take things too far. Long John Silver's years ago, came up with a tagline, we speak fish. This was confusing customers because instead of highlighting their fresh seafood or their expertise, they just said, we speak fish.
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This is another one. Could instinct make you extinct? So this was for a business software consultancy, far too abstract, making visitors guess what they actually offer. Provide some insight on what is right and wrong here. Sure. So, okay, a couple rules of thumb when you're trying to look at a tagline for your company. The first of all, I would tell you, and I'm not an attorney, but by the way, it's gotta be trademarkable. If there's anything that you're gonna trademark, my goodness. Make sure that you have a couple options you can go bring to your, your legal team and go, hey, can we do some knockout searches to see if we can actually hang our hats on and own this? So that's one thing. All right. Second thing, though, when we think about structure and how it's supposed to sound and how ethereal it is, a very, very important rule of thumb is the difference between B2B and taglines. Okay, you have to think about it this way. In B2B, your tagline is that five to six words that really answers the first question a business is going to have about you, which is, well, what do you do? Because imagine walking into a room, you shake hands with a business owner. What are they going to ask you?
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What do you do? Yeah, that's what your. That's your business buyer wants to know right away. So we're talking like, top of the hero section on the homepage. Boom. Get to the point. Unless the company name has what they do in it.
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You snuck ahead of me. I love that. Yes, yes. Because there's the balance act. Right. How it works with the name. It has to work with the name and not be too repetitive. Right. Here's the flip side, though. B2C brands, I feel like in the best way, get away with murder with taglines. They can be so out there.
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How come Nike can just be. Just do it, or oh, my gosh, brands are like, you're worth it. Because the question that a consumer asks when they're looking at purchasing a product is not, tell me what you do, Nike. It is, tell me the promise of who I will become or what I will experience when I have your product in my hand.
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Therein lies the difference. And so those five to six words in the tagline, you have a bit more wiggle room to really be creative and get above it with a promise. Concepts that maybe isn't as concrete. So if you're in B2B listening to this, here's my encouragement. I'm not saying come up with a boring tagline, but the idea would be that when you're writing it, start with the concrete. What is the concrete promise of what do you do for them that speaks to value from there, can you improve and iterate and judge it a little bit with some wordsmithing to make it a bit more punchy? Yeah. And then it becomes more memorable. Which is the key for a people that talk about just do it versus even the brand is just the strength of how that has all worked together over the decades that it's been in force. So want to talk about something quickly here? The tendency is for people to now use AI as a means by which we can just have some smart input and have it develop a tagline and have it develop, you know, the key points of differentiation, so on and so forth.
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There's some caution there. The caution is you're only as good as the input, number one. But also the caution is it's not trademarkable right now. Yes.
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Correct. It's going to take years and years and years for this to get up to the Supreme Court. For it to be trademarkable.
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So talk to us a little bit about the importance of input and. And the dividing line between what you can use AI for and what human absolutely needs to take hold of in place of it. Yeah. Such an important question because even as AI, really, when I started leveraging ChatGPT and now I'm primarily a cloud user, but I actually will pop between both of them. Interestingly enough, as a writer, I love to see the comparison and contrast. It's great. Okay, so whatever your tool of choice, here's what I would say that's really important is the inputs that you need to have are two big pieces that you've got to really think through and kind of create. The first thing is ICP analysis. Now, you can actually go into Claude and help ask it to help you do this, but there's some specific questions you can ask it to get very crystal clear. Don't just give me Claude, the demographics and psychographics around my top audiences that you should think I should be going after or that we think we should be going after, but give me, in writing, in a specific sentence or a quote, what the bottom line, heart pain is that this audience is facing what is their burning platform?
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And so you have to push it a little bit to get a very solid written. Oh, gosh, Kate. The thing that I need is this. And here's. I would need this thing to solve it. Get specific. In your ICP analysis, the second thing that you need to have in order to get the best outputs from AI is what we call a tone of voice system. Now, I can't go super deep on this right now, but what I will say is you can develop this in conjunction with Claud or you can develop it on your own. Many practitioners know how to do that. Many marketers do that on their own accord. Great. I want you to push it, though, beyond just the name of the tone of voice. I want you to think about when you close your eyes, how does the brand actually sound? So you can actually build sections around grammar, usage, punctuation, usage, cadence and rhythm. If you were to go ask ChatGPT or Claude, give me the cadence and rhythm, 10 bullet points of how it sounds. If I were to close my eyes, you'd be so excited about what it comes up with that sounds on brand for you. So these two inputs, Lori, are imperative so that when you move through the process of leveraging AI as you're iterating, we can talk about that to develop brand outputs. They're far better and cleaner and on Brand for you. I love it. Incredible advice there as well. As we're closing in at the end, I want to make sure that we talk about an incredible case study before and after messaging it. And at the end of the day, Kate, what is most important here is the trust that the messaging creates in the eye of the beholder is all about trust. Do they trust us more? Do they trust our brand compared to the competition? And if they do, they will raise their hand and say, call me, I want an appointment. Or they will go in and buy. That's the most important thing. That is really the deliberate output of why this process is so important. You have a company that you've worked with and really a light bulb moment that went off for you on some real world transformation called CallRail.
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Talk to us about that. Right? And so, all right, CallRail came to me and in fact, I can share screen for those of you listening in. I hope you can come back to the video recording at a later date. But CallRail is an amazing brand. Just for a bit of context, they have a full PLG motion. So this, this company is doing about 100 million a year, all full PLG. Wow, wow, wow.
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Really cool, right? And they came to me about a year and a half ago and they said, listen, we're really struggling because we're kind of tacking on AI onto the current platform, but we don't know how to position this. And really messages in such a way to drive conversions and revenue. People aren't going and clicking and doing what we want them to do. So I want to, I want to just share a bit of before and after for you for context.
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So I took them through the same exercises that I do currently with clients.
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But essentially, if you were to look at the. Before, their tagline was call tracking plus AI that turns calls into higher close rates. My goodness, that's a mouthful. And, well, there was a lot happening here and they were missing, you know, a core value prop and it just. But it just seemed disjointed overall, right? There's like, what are we really? What are you selling? And you know, to make it matters even worse, they really weren't talking to differentiators. They were actually just going right into product features, features and benefits. They were missing this key component right below the fold of the page about like, well, here's how we're different and better than the competition. So what we did is we really leveraged plays on words here. Get creative, you guys. But CallRail, so their new tagline is make every conversation Count.
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CallRail actually is a tracking system. So there was a double entendre with the word count. Make every conversation count. And then the value prop. When your businesses on the line, you can't afford a disconnect between marketing and revenue. CallRail connects that us. Look at, look at the way that we were kind of layering these, these meanings and these analogies. And all of a sudden it was, it was really fascinating that people understood from the name, call track, connect conversation with only two sentences. Wow.
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I love that we built differentiators as well. But can I just get to the bottom line? So pretty crazy. Within one month of actually deploying this new messaging, here's what's interesting. They had more than a 20% increase in conversions on their website and they changed to nothing.
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That's trust. Yeah, it's trust right there, Lori. For them, a conversion is. I actually signed up with a free account. They also saw a 20% increase in paid buyers after that. I love it. This is the power of it. And you know, do you think that AI is actually making marketers worse at messaging? No, I just think it's confusing you and it's okay. It's okay to be in the messy middle right now. To tie a bow on what we're talking about earlier with a workflow or process. With AI, I really want to encourage you that you're a great marketer because you're creative and you're smart and you have brain power, you have experience and you have tenure in your industry. Don't let go of that and give the full ownness to AI to develop your message. I want you to remember the inputs, but then leverage AI as your premium draft creator. It's going to give you fantastic drafts. But guess what? Pull your pencil out, sit down and scratch stuff off and go pull your thesaurus. And that's where the magic happens, where a Message goes from 75% wow to 100% Trust building, brand loyalty, conversion, generating message. Well, and you accomplished that with CallRail as well. What is the best way, Kate, for our audience to get in contact with you? Well, if you have any questions on some of this, if you're kind of nerding out over the brand stuff, feel free to certainly check out my website, which is Kate Deleo.com but also connect with me and send me a message on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you and get to know you. Thank you. At Avocet, we believe AI does not replace strategy. It exposes whether you have one. The brands that will stand out are the ones building strong messaging architectures before they scale content production. Because trust is not created by volume. It is created by clarity, consistency, and human understanding. Kate DiLeo, thank you so much for your appearance on StrategyCast. Thanks, Lori, for having me. It's been a pleasure.
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I'm gonna repeat that really quick, okay? Yeah. Kate DiLeo, thank you so much for your appearance on StrategyCast.
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Thanks for having me. Laurie, it's been a pleasure.
